Aylo, the owner of Pornhub and a firm accused in its previous guise MindGeek of building its success in part on copyright violating content, has been awarded a multi-million lawsuit award for copyright infringement against it.
Aylo Premium was awarded $2,157,000 by a judge in California, when it was deemed that the people allegedly behind the porn site Good Porn hosted some of Aylo Premium’s content.
Amrit Kumar, one of those who allegedly ran Good Porn, must pay statutory damages of over $2 million to Aylo. Kumar along with Lizette Lundberg and Emilie Brunn, who also allegedly ran Good Porn, must pay $46,470 for Aylo’s legal fees.
Kumar claimed that he and Aylo, which owns a long list of porn sites and studios including Brazzers, RedTube, YouPorn as well as Pornhub, had a “bilateral agreement” that allowed him to stream content from some of Aylo’s porn stables.
This did not stand up in the civil case. A judge said that documents produced by Kumar to back up this claim lacked “any indicia of reliability or authenticity”.
Jason Tucker, who worked as a consultant for Aylo on its case, said the ruling was the result of “flagrantly” exhibiting full-length video content without proper licensing agreements, and that Kumar ignored takedown notices.
“We anticipate additional filings will be needed to fully execute the judgment and for the damages sought,” Tucker said.
For many years, before MindGeek was rebranded to Aylo in summer 2023, the company was accused of allowing porn content that uploaders did not have the rights to publish to be hosted on some of its sites, including Pornhub. It was also accused of hosting illegal content on Pornhub, including videos of sexual abuse.
The 2023 rebrand was designed to be a fresh start for the company, but it has been hit with legal problems since. A few months after the rebrand Aylo was sued for alleged sex and human trafficking: the latest Pornhub lawsuit related to the now-defunct porn studio GirlsDoPorn, which was shut down by the FBI after it was found to be coercing and deceiving performers.
Aylo has also blocked Pornhub from being accessed in multiple US states over the past few years, citing toughening age verification rules, a situation that is by no means unique to the US though.
Still, there was some good news for Aylo recently. The annual Pornhub Insights data dump revealed that searches on the site in 2023 including the word “android” were up by a huge amount, leading to some handy sex robot headlines.
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